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Everyone, who eats them, can reccommend a place that serves the very best beef burgers. Naturally, most people have their own favourites. So, it would seem that there are many places that serve the ‘very best burgers’. I havetried a few of these highly reccommended places and have with one exception (Gourmet Burger Kitchen – a chain that originated in New Zealand) been disappointed. Most ‘very best burgers’ turn out to be ok (usually) but an anti-climax (mostly).

Now, I am going to seem very conceited. That is because I believe that I make the ‘very best burgers’ myself in our home, and so should you. My recipe is dead simple. I take minced beef with a lowish fat content (10% or less), add a pinch of salt and a small spoon of oil (sunflower or olive) and, after washing my hands, mush the three ingredients together before hand shaping patties of the sizes preferred by those who will eat them. Then, I cook them on a griddle. That’s all. No egg or breadcrumbs are added. Try this for yourself and you will no longer be wasting your money on overpriced, mediochre burgers.

While looking for something to eat on the train between Cambridge and London, I spotted a sandwich in a colourful wrapping (illustrated above). It was a ‘LGBT’ sandwich containing Lettuce, Guacamole, Bacon, and Tomato. Well, the initials ‘LGBT’ usually refer to ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender’. The colours of the sandwich’s wrapping are those associated with the LGBT ‘community’.

I wondered whether M&S, the suppliers of this colourfully wrapped sandwich were:

trying to appeal to LGBT customers

trying to be ‘politically correct’

both of the above

neither 1 nor 2

having a laugh at the expense of the LGBT ‘community’

or, all of the above

Who knows? I did not buy this sandwich, but selected a similar one, the BLT, which lacks guacamole.

We entered a popular Thai restaurant, part of a chain, in London’s West Hampstead and waited for our friends to arrive. As they were taking a long time to reach us, we ordered some prawn crackers to quell our pangs of hunger. They arrived quickly with, much to my surprise, a couple of gooey dipping sauces.

The rather unfriendly waitress who delivered our snack, pushed our cheaply produced paper menus aside and said with an abrupt tone of voice:

“Don’t dirty the menus with the sauces.”

I was surprised. Never before in over sixty years of eating regularly in restaurants all over the world have I been asked, nay ordered, to keep the menu clean. I felt that this order to maintain the integrity of the menus to be unwelcome, unfriendly, and impolite.

After eating a revoltingly over sweet meal, I told the waitress about my disgust at her extraordinary instruction when she delivered the prawn crackers. She seemed unfazed by my complaint. I will never ever enter that restaurant again!

Some years ago, we were visiting relatives in the city of Buffalo in New York State (USA). We had never met them before, which was a pity since they turned aout to be a quite delightful couple. Apart from that, they were very interesting and interested in everything. Unfortunately, one of them has passed away.

We were travelling around New York State in a rented car when we visited my relatives in Buffalo. One day, they suggested that we went for an outing. Being much younger than them, I decided that we should all travel in our rented car. They were very mysterious about our destination. They gave me directions and i followed them. About 50 miles east of Buffalo we arrived at a neatly laid out small ‘one horse town’ and parked next to a pizzeria.

My relatives ordered one pizza. It was large enough for each of the five of us in our party to eat to our satisfaction. Of all the many pizzas I have eaten so far, this was one of the best that I can remember. I cannot rember the name of the pizzeria, but the town’s name is WARSAW.

A ring of dough

A colourful topping

It’s Italian, it’s pizza

PS after lunch at Warsaw, we continued to the nearby Letchworth State Park, which well deserves its nickname ‘The Grand Canyon of the East’

Quite a long time ago when I was in my twenties, I was invited by an Italian friend to stay at the hotel, which his parents ran in the Val ‘d’Aosta in a mountanous part of north west Italy. The hotel, which was quite luxurious, catered mainly for elderly clients.

We used to eat meals in the hotel’s elegant dining room. All of the tables had starched table cloths and napkins (serviettes), beautifully polished glassware, and shiny silver cutlery. What struck me as surprising was that by almost every table setting, there were small bottles filled with tablets and capsules of varying shapes and colours. These were laid out ready for those of the diners who were required to take medicines with their meals. The image of the medicine bottles as table settings has stuck in my my mind more than the rest of my stay at the hotel.

Now, many years later, although I rarely eat at such elegantly laid tables as in the hotel in the Val d’Aosta, I too need to have my collection of assorted tablets every breakfast and evening meal. I never imagined that I would be doing this when I was staying at my friend’s parents’ hotel. Well as the annoying saying goes “such is life“.

My earliest recollection of eating Chinese food was in a restaurant called ‘Tung Hsing’ in Golders Green almost opposite the old Hippodrome Theatre. It opened in the 1960s and was one of the first restaurants in London to serve Pekinese food, rather than the then usual Cantonese cuisine. The restaurant was owned by a retired ambassador from Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist China and his wife, whom I believe was responsible for the very excellent food served.

Although I am sure they were available, I am not sure whether I used chopsticks when eating at the Tung Hsing. Maybe, I learned to use them there, but I really cannot remember. Whatever the case, I have been eating Chinese food with chopsticks for many decades. I would not say that I am 100 percent proficient with them, but I feel that using them to eat Chinese food satisfies me.

Chinese-style food is very popular in India. Most Indians eat in Chinese restaurants using western utensils such as plate, fork and spoon. If you ask for chopsticks, they are usually available, but they are not supplied as default table settings.

Some years ago, early this century, a new Chinese restaurant opened in Museum Road in Bangalore. We visited soon after its inauguration. It was a lovely restaurant and the food was good by Indian Chinese restaurant standards. As usual, we asked for bowls and chopsticks. The waiter disappeared for a while, and then returned empty-handed.

“There are no chopsticks,” he told us.

“Why not?” we asked.

“I will ask the manager.”

The Manager came over, and explained:

“We have been so busy since we opened, and many of the guests have taken them home as souvenirs. So, we have run out of them”

When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time with my aunt and her children. They lived a few minute’s walk from our family home and I enjoyed spending time with them. Often, my sister and I used to spend a whole day at my aunt’s house, sometimes over night especially when my parents were away on a trip.

My aunt fed us. Sometimes she made us fried eggs. Then, I was a very fussy eater. In those far-off days, I only liked the white part of the fried egg, not the central yellow bit. One of my cousins only liked the central yellow part, but disliked the white surrounding it. My aunt was an extremely down-to-earth individual, laden with more than a fair share of common sense. Her solution to the fried egg situation was that after making the fried egg, she used to carefully dissect the yoke portion of the finished product and serve it to my cousin. I was given the white portion of the egg with a neat hole in it where the yellow had been.

Today, many decades later, I am not keen on any part of a fried egg and do not eat eggs prepared in this way. I much prefer omelettes and hard-boiled eggs. However, I do enjoy making them for other people, The challenge is to avoid breaking the yoke.

I had a difficult birth. Both my mother and I nearly died when I was born. For the first few weeks of my life, I was not a healthy baby; my future was uncertain. Then, as I grew a little, I was a poor eater. My mother, who worried about me greatly, felt that it was best that I only ate what I liked. As a result, I became a fussy and unadventurous eater. My immediate reaction on being offered something that was outside the tiny range of foods that I was prepared to eat, was to refuse it.

Although at an early age, I was happy to eat tomato sauce either with pasta, which I still enjoy, or with baked beans, which I now dislike intensely. I recall eating a fresh (i.e. uncooked) tomato for the first time when I was about 13.

When I was 20, I joined some friends on a camping trip in France. We travelled around the country by car, camping at night. We would eat picnics for lunch and visit restaurants in the evening. One of our camping places was at Banyuls on the Mediterranean coast of France close to the Spanish border. One evening, we drove across the border to Port Bou in Spain. Naturally as we were in Spain, my friends ordered paella.

Paella, as many people know, is a rice based dish. I was a bit skeptical because I had managed to avoid eating rice (and rice pudding) prior to this brief trip to Spain. Something attracted me to the paella, maybe it was hunger or its delicious appearance, and I tried a portion. As for the rice, it was love at first bite. Since then, I have been a great fan of rice, which I had never tried during the first 20 years of my life. I still dislike rice pudding as it is made in the UK. In contrast, I really enjoy phirni, an Indian version of rice pudding.

Since that trip to Port Bou, my tastes have become quite adventurous. I rarely refuse trying something new, even if only once.

Looking back on my childhood, I now realise that my very conservative tastes deprived me of the delights of many of the gourmet meals, which my parents enjoyed while travelling with me and my sister. They would enjoy fine French or Italian food whilst I stuck to my ham or steak and chips.

Well, as the French say À chacun son goût. I am glad that mygoût has become more exciting.

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Sometime during the summer in the early to mid-1980s, when I was living in Kent, two young people came to stay with me from land-locked Hungary. Because travelling opportunities were limited and money was short in the Communist country, people did not travel abroad as much as people in Western Europe. My two guests had never seen the sea, except in photos and on the TV or cinema screen.

One evening, I drove my guests to the Kent coast to see the sea. We parked by a beach. As soon as we had stopped, the two lads leapt out of my car and ran into the sea fully clothed. That is how excited they were to see real waves and the sea.

After experiencing the sea, they asked me about ‘fish and chips’, which their English teacher in Budapest had mentioned. We walked to a nearby fish and chips shop and placed an order. When the fillets of fish arrived wrapped in crisp golden batter, my friends looked at them, wondering whether or not they had been served pieces of fish. They had never seen fish prepared like this before.

Fish prepared, fried and covered with batter, as it is served in British fish and chip shops is actually not a dish of British origin. According to that mine of knowledge Wikipedia, it was the Sephardic Jews, who settled in the UK from the 16th century onwards, who introduced fish prepared this way. Alexis Soyer (1810-58), the famous 19th century chef wrote in his A shilling cookery for the people, published in 1854:

“There is another excellent way of frying fish, which is constantly in use by the children of Israel … In some families … they dip the fish, first in flour, then in egg, and fry in oil“, which is more or less what happens in a fish and chips shop.

This leads me to the real subject of the article: a reccommendation. There are many highly-rated fish and chips shops (‘chippies’) in the British Isles. The ‘Fryers Delight’ is one of them. This unpretensious shop, whose decor seems unaltered since the day it opened back in in 1958, serves excellent fish with superb chips cut in the shop’s kitchen, all fried in beef dripping. I have eaten there twice, and look forward to my next visit. The staff are friendly, and the prices are very reasonable and the food is good value for money.

The FRYERS DELIGHT, which is open from noon to 10pm every day except Sunday is located at: